Re: About human natures desire for more. Is it genetic?

Your question is an interesting one, but one must be careful when
generalizing so broadly about human nature. It is probably more fair to say
that there is rather wide variation among people with regard to the kind of
"motivation for more" that you have described. I apologize for falling back
upon personal experience here,  but it has always seemed to me that some
people are never content with the status quo and are continually driven
toward novelty, as you describe, while others are creatures of habit, wary
and perhaps even fearful of change. Most fall somewhere between these two
extremes. 

You mention two very different phenomena in your post. First, the desire
for more in terms of personal gain (more money, more food, more sex):
natural selection favors organisms that are interested in sending copies of
their genes to subsequent generation (either through their own reproduction
of that of relatives). This is as true for humans as it is for the rest of
living things. I don't know of any studies examining the heritability of
ambition, but I imagine that it is a product of both genetics and cultural
environment, just like pretty much everything else in the human repertoire.

Your second phenomenon, regarding the ways in which technology and fashion
change over time, is more a matter of cultural evolution, a very
interesting topic that currently receives a lot of attention (see Ehrlich &
Levin [2005] for a review). I would place my bet on the idea (not mine)
that technology (take transportation tech) advances very rapidly because
there is an enormous and lucrative market for it... each improvement has
the potential to earn a lot of money for its designers (and we know from
the previous paragraph that most people never mind grabbing a bit more $$).
The fashion business is another question entirely... beyond improvements
in material design, I don't think one can say that fashion ever progresses,
for there are no consistent standards, such as speed and efficiency, by
which fashion can be judged. Fashion evolves along with the standards
by which it is judged in the minds of fashion-oriented people.


Ehrlich, P. & Levin, S. (2005). The evolution of norms. PLoS Biol. 3: e194